The Agency of Muslim Women and ‘the Muslimwoman’ in Early Modern England

Abstract

Acknowledging that women from Muslim backgrounds arrived on British shores well before the first record of an openly Muslim woman in the 1830s, but that they would have had no real option other than to assimilate to English mores, including religious ones, this article investigates the ‘Muslimwoman’ (miriam cooke’s neologism) as constitutive of English culture from the sixteenth century and into the eighteenth century. Examples include representations of elite women from the Ottoman dynasty in histories, polemics, and plays. Deploying ‘the Muslimwoman’ as a heuristic allows us to assess the impact of historical Muslim women on early modern English culture.